The small town of Youghal stands at the mouth of the Blackwater, one of the principal rivers of south Munster. There was a monastic settlement here in early Christian times and there is evidence of a Viking presence in the eighth and ninth centuries. But the town does not really acquire the sinews of urbanity until the early thirteenth century, when the Normans secured its first charter.
The town was devastated in 1579 during the great Desmond rebellion, but it recovered quickly after the end of hostilities. It passed into the ownership of Sir Walter Raleigh until 1602, when, strapped for cash, he sold it to Richard Boyle for a knockdown price.
Boyle was the classic man on the make. A yeoman’s son from Kent, he studied at Cambridge and the Middle Temple in London. He arrived in Ireland in 1588 and, using forged letters of introduction, managed to insinuate his way into government circles. He was rewarded by securing the appointment of deputy escheator, which meant that he had responsibility for the disposal and administration of lands forfeit to the crown. This was a position well suited to his talent for corruption and peculation. As a result, he drew the enmity of a number of influential figures in government and even spent some time in prison in the early 1590s.
In 1595, he married a well-connected heiress who brought him a modest fortune, although this was much diminished by the depredations of the Nine Years’ war in Munster. Once again, his enemies brought charges against him but he successfully defended himself in London, where he enjoyed the queen’s protection. She liked his dash and seemed prepared to wink at his malfeasance. His wife died in childbirth in 1599 (the child also died) and Boyle remarried four years later. His second wife — and mother of his many children — was the daughter of an Irish privy councillor. Boyle was now a man of substance, having secured both financial fortune and social position.
From here, his rise was irresistible. He was knighted on his wedding day in 1603, appointed privy councillor for Munster in 1606, for Ireland in 1613, elected an Irish MP in 1614, titled as Lord Youghal in 1616 and finally established as 1st earl of Cork in 1620. By now, he had become the richest man in Ireland. He had been able to pay £4,000 to Sir George Villiers, the royal favourite and soon to be the duke of Buckingham, to secure his earldom. By the late 1620s, he was able to lend King Charles I the enormous sum of £15,000 at short notice.
The great earl of Cork, as he became known, was full of energy. He was responsible for establishing or greatly improving many towns, including Clonakilty, Charleville, Midleton and Doneraile. In Youghal, he built the Widows’ Alms Houses (1602) and established himself in a splendid new house, The College, beside the Collegiate church. This he also restored and improved — although not to the extent that he had promised — and in the south transept he placed a splendid tomb to commemorate himself and his family (see next photograph). It is the principal attraction of the church today. Little of the fabric of St Mary’s survives from the great earl’s time, having been the victim of yet another insensitive Victorian ‘restoration’.
He was also an early industrialist and established many ironworks, being one of a number of New English adventurers to do likewise. His ironworks required charcoal, which he supplied by felling hundreds of acres of trees. It was little wonder that the Gaelic poet who lamented the fall of the Butler house at Kilcash wrote,
Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? / Ta deireadh na gcoillte ar lár
Or in Frank O’Connor’s translation (with Yeats’s hand very visible)
What shall we do for timber? / The last of the woods is down
In his pomp, Cork lived like a medieval magnate, semi-autonomous in his own domain. It was a bilingual world, and while the earl spoke no Irish his four-year-old son did and acted as translator for his father. He adopted Irish usages, such as fostering his children among reliable tenants (thus presumably accounting for his little boy’s bilingualism) and having Irish-speaking Catholics both as servants and tenants.
He brooked no opposition. In 1627, an ironmaster with whom he was in dispute was arrested in Youghal despite carrying a safe passage from the king. The earl ignored this and made the man amenable to his own palatine justice. He was not one to be crossed and he resented any intrusion into his personal realm. Central authority was far away and as far as the earl was concerned that was the best place for it.
This brought him into conflict with Sir Thomas Wentworth, appointed lord deputy of Ireland in 1632. A centraliser determined to assert royal prerogatives in all corners of Ireland, Wentworth managed to alienate every important interest group in the country. He might have expected problems with the Old English (the descendants of the medieval Hiberno-Normans) and the remaining Gaelic families on account of their shared Catholicism. But his natural allies should have been New English Protestants like the earl of Cork. His attempts to foist the high church principles of the king and archbishop Laud of Canterbury on the Church of Ireland — where low church, Puritan attitudes were entrenched — did not help.
It got personal. The earl, who was much devoted to funerary monuments for himself and his family, had one erected in Christ Church cathedral in Dublin. Wentworth thought it vulgar and ostentatious and insensitively situated. He forced the earl to remove it to another part of the church. Even worse was the question of the impropriations: the sequestering of church lands and assets by rich laymen. Wentworth was determined to reverse this and to recover these assets for the crown. The earl of Cork was by no means the only offender but he was singled out by Wentworth as an over-mighty subject and exactly the sort of slippery provincial operator whose stratagems offended against everything that Wentworth aspired to: rational and uniform administration in the king’s name. He had the earl arraigned before the Court of Castle Chamber (the Irish equivalent of Star Chamber). Eventually, the two met face-to-face and agreed a fine of £30,000 in full settlement, subsequently halved. Wentworth had made himself a dangerous enemy.
Just how dangerous became clear in 1640 when Charles I and the English parliament were on the collision course that led to the English civil war and the execution of the king. The Irish parliament, in which the earl’s faction was a significant element, adopted a remonstrance against Wentworth which they sent to the London parliament. That body feared that the lord deputy was raising an Irish Catholic army to bring over to England, and had Wentworth recalled. The earl travelled to London and gave evidence against Wentworth, who was impeached, tried, convicted and executed.
The earl of Cork died in 1643 aged 77. He left a distinguished line. His eldest surviving son, also Richard (1612–98), became 2nd earl of Cork, 1st earl of Burlington in the English peerage and lord high treasurer of Ireland from 1660 until 1695. His younger son, Roger Boyle (1621–79), became Lord Broghill and later 1st earl of Orrery. As Broghill, he was one of the more ferocious Cromwellian commanders. The fourth son, Francis Boyle (1623–99), became the 1st Viscount Shannon: his grandson Henry, earl of Shannon, was speaker of the Irish House of Commons from 1733 to 1753. The youngest son of the great earl, Robert (1627–91), made the most lasting contribution to the world. Often spoken of as the father of English chemistry, he enunciated the law that bears his name, a formula known to generations of schoolchildren, although happily forgotten by adults.
